DEEP DESIRES
Charlotte Stein

Table of Contents

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

More from Mischief

About Mischief

Copyright

About the Publisher

I don’t mean to keep spying on him, as he strips out of his clothes. But the thing is, I just don’t expect it. No one could expect it. I’ve seen him in hallways and around The Courtyard looking so strange and still and boxed in, in his always buttoned overcoats and his too thick glasses and that face of his, as expressionless as a glacier.

He just doesn’t look the type to have the body he does. He looks like the type to be doughy underneath, as flaccid and pale as undercooked fish, but once he’s gotten down to his queerly exciting underwear – long in the leg and somehow skintight – I’m transfixed.

I actually stop pretending I’m drawing the curtains and let myself linger on the taut planes of his body, so perfectly visible beneath that clingy material. And those thighs, God, those thighs. Where did he get those thighs from? And how do they look so good and thick and solid beneath what is, essentially, a pair of longjohns?

He should look ridiculous. He is ridiculous. Mrs Hoffman from 3F calls him the Serial Killer, because no one knows where he works or what he does, and Kayla from 4D swears blind she saw him opening and shutting his door three times, like something she saw once on CSI.

But I don’t know. I don’t know about him, and I want to know even less about their furtive gossip sessions around the pool that sits in the middle of our courtyard.

It’s sitting there right now, giving a dull blue glow to this thing I’m definitely not doing. Like a neon lamp flashing stop stop stop, before it gets as far as, say, him taking off that long-sleeved woollen top.

Which he does, while I clutch the curtain into one sweaty fist and pretend this isn’t affecting me at all. Because it definitely isn’t. It’s having no more effect on me than seeing him peel an orange did the other day.

I just looked out of my window, down onto his window across the courtyard, and there he was. Sat at a table, eating a piece of fruit. No big deal.

Only it is a big deal, because now he’s peeling something else altogether. He’s peeling himself, and after a moment I can see the solid mass of his pectoral muscles. I can see the nearly honeyed hue of his skin, pale from the pathetic weather up here in Darkly Falls, but buttery because of something uniquely him.

Though his skin tone isn’t the thing that draws my eye. It isn’t even the sight of the rough scratch of hair all over his chest and belly, or the thought of how many crunches he had to do before his abs hardened into that exact shape.

It’s the way he puts his thumb and forefinger to his lips, licks, and then slicks that wetness over one tight nipple.

Lord, I don’t even know what to say about that. The urge to slam the curtain shut wells up in me, bright and strong, but the questions filling my head win out. Questions like:

Do men actually do things like that?

I can’t quite believe that they do, given the information I’ve previously been given by Sid, my last unfortunate foray into relationships – I got no feeling there, just suck my fucking cock, etc. – and yet there it is, right in front of me. A man, rubbing and pinching and playing with one of his own nipples. And then even more incriminating, his mouth opens slightly – as though touching himself that way feels like the best thing in the world.

I can almost hear him moaning, through the glass. Though, of course, that’s what makes me realise what he’s going to do.

I realise it before I let my gaze travel downwards, to the thick, heavy bulge between his legs. I realise it before he tugs at the waistband of those ridiculous longjohns, and everything in me screams, look away, look away now.

I think I even go as far as to take a step backwards, but it’s far too little and far too late. Besides, if I move too much he’ll undoubtedly see me, even with my apartment all dark like this and his all light. He’ll make out my silhouette, or the slide of the curtains, and then I’ll always be the woman across the courtyard who watched him ease his underwear down over his heavy-boned hips, to reveal his glorious cock.

Because, by God, it is glorious. I’ve seen enough terrible porn while huddled beneath the safety of my sheets to know what a glorious one should look like, even if I’ve never viewed one in reality. In reality, I’ve seen short stunted ones and big hairy ones and ones that look as though they belong on someone as muted and strange as he is. But I’ve never seen a cock like the one he actually has.

He isn’t cut for a start. A man as tidy seeming as him should be cut, but apparently his sexual self doesn’t give a shit about things like that. His sexual self is as generous as he seems mean, as lush as he is contained.

It’s quite a revelation. But not as much of a revelation as the size of him. I want to glance at my wrist just to make a comparison, even though that’s ridiculous. No one has a cock as thick as a wrist, and even if they did they wouldn’t be living in some godforsaken apartment block called The Courtyard, waiting for neighbours to spy on them.

He should be out there fucking someone, I think. Fucking some tight-bodied, thin-lipped girl with his thick, deliciously curved cock.

Is it such a crime that I’m picturing it right now? The girl with her legs spread wide, that big, solid thing easing in and out of her wet, willing hole. Him losing some of that strange, serial-killer control until he makes that noise for her – the one I can’t quite hear.

Lord. Why am I like this?

I don’t even know what this is, to be honest. I only know that my nipples have stiffened beneath the stupid Mickey Mouse printed material of my pyjama top, and, when I move even the tiniest fraction, I can feel how wet I suddenly am – wetter than I’ve been in a long, long time. Wetter than I ever was for Sid, and his constant gruelling demands that I just enjoy it, that I’d better fucking enjoy it, that if I don’t enjoy it he’s going to make me with his fists.

And it’s for him. The Serial Killer. The guy with the eyes that always seem as though they’re covered in gauze. The one I’m urging to masturbate with my mind, even as my sanity begs him not to. Don’t, I think, at no one in particular.

But then he strokes one hand over himself, long and slow, and I forget I’ve ever had any thoughts about anything at all, ever.

It just looks so good. The way he does it, all nice and easy as though he’s got all the time in the world and he’s absolutely not stood in front of his own window right now. In fact, I think he’s kind of leaning against his window, which seems even ruder somehow. He’s pushing into the glass, one hand stroking and stroking over his cock, until the flesh there is as slick as I feel.

I don’t mind admitting that the sight excites me. It makes me think of dirty things, like maybe he got some lube before he started, and is now spreading it all over himself. Or possibly he licked his palm when I wasn’t looking, and all that slipperiness is his spit, getting worked and worked into his stiff cock.

Though neither of these ideas is as hot as the one that occurs a moment later: that maybe it’s his own lubrication. He’s so turned on that he’s leaking thin streamers of pre-come, and, if I was just a little closer, I’d be able to see it clearly.

I want to be closer. I want to take that cock in my mouth, and suck until he’s even slicker. I want him to moan for me the way I know he’s moaning now – head back, mouth open, body vibrating with the kind of pleasure I’ve never experienced.

His hand tightens on his cock to the point where I’m sure it should hurt, but the roll of his hips says otherwise. He’s practically fucking his fist now, lips moving around words I long to hear. Are they dirty, those words? Is he saying a stream of hot things to himself, to urge his orgasm on?

I like to think so, but it’s hard to tell, when it’s someone like him. I can’t imagine him saying stuff like yeah, suck me off, baby, but then again I could never have imagined him doing what he’s doing.

Fucking himself, where anyone could see. I mean, it’s three o’clock in the morning, but that doesn’t mean anything. The drunk girl from 9G often stumbles home around this time, and I bet she’d have to walk right past his window to get to the entrance. Even if she’d have to stand on tiptoe to see in, it’s still too exposed.

Unless maybe he wants to be exposed, to her. Maybe she stumbles through the courtyard and then right into his apartment, to do all the things I’d never dare to: suck him and fuck him and let him come all over her, God, I want him to come all over her.

He’s going to do it now, I can tell. His hips are jerking and he’s biting his lip and the head of his cock looks so red and swollen, as though he’s just about to burst. Go on, I think, go on, as he rubs himself faster and faster, thumb sliding over the slick tip on every upstroke, body shuddering and shuddering.

I can almost taste his climax, can almost see it arcing from the head of his swollen cock, but it seems as though it’s never going to come. He can’t get at it, in a way that makes me just ache for him. My entire body feels strung taut and raw, but it gives this one extra pulse for him. This little shiver of something that gets me closer to the glass, that makes me dare to drop my bunched hand one inch closer to my breast.

It must be as bad for him as it is for me. My nipples just feel so stiff, so tense with pleasure that I’m not willing to spill, and between my legs there’s that same sensation magnified a thousand times.

Liquid is soaking into my little sleep shorts. My sex swells against the material, tight and aching for release, but I can’t, I can’t. I’m in darkness, but I still can’t.

It’s too much. I have to be satisfied with watching and imagining a million dirty things – like him finally spurting all over my spread cunt – and even those are too much. They make me a pervert, a person who could rightly be called a voyeur, though I confess I didn’t really know what being a voyeur meant, until now.

It’s like I’m inside his skin, as his cock leaps and his entire body ripples, that firm hand of his slowing a little on his cock as the first thick pulse of come eases out over his fist.

The second is stronger and he seems to go rigid when it hits – as though the pleasure’s too much. And then the third spasm hits and it is too much, it’s definitely too much, because he puts his free hand to his mouth and bites down so hard I feel an answering pang of pleasure go through me.

It’s so intense that for a moment I’m sure I’ve climaxed too. I’m absolutely drenched down there, and all of these little aftershocks are jolting through me – though, when he finally moves away from the window, I know I haven’t gone over.

I know because this great aching void opens up in me, unresolved, unsatisfied, untouched. And though I try to step back and think of other things – the shift at the grocery store I’ve got tomorrow, the one dirty tape I possess that I could masturbate to now, if I so chose – I can’t.

It’s too late. He has me now.

I see him in the hallway getting his mail, but shamefully pretend I don’t. I go as far as to pretend we’re actually strangers, and have never so much as exchanged a nod of the head. Instead of the truth, which is still utmost in my mind:

I watched you masturbate last night.

I think the words at his back, as he turns and begins to sift through whatever letters he’s received. Probably bills, I’m sure. Maybe a leaflet from a charity he donates to. Possibly a subscription to a really innocent and normal magazine.

Like Horny Voyeurs Monthly.

Because that’s what I am, isn’t it? I stepped out of my life of supermarket working and TV watching and dying a little inside every day, and I watched with bated breath as a man did something sexual to himself, in the ostensible privacy of his home.

Even though it’s not really privacy at all now. I mean, he had to know that wasn’t private. He must have understood that I could see him, that anyone could have seen him, even though I rarely see an open curtain in this place.

But when I push those words into his back and he doesn’t even turn, I start to think otherwise. He didn’t secretly want someone to see him. And whatever connection I’m imagining between us is just that: imaginary. None of this is actually real. I’m just a loser who spied on someone, and he’s actually a really cool guy who has an amazing job, like software developer.

Those glasses he wears? They’re not dorky. They’re … they’re hipster.

And that’s what I’m thinking when he closes the metal door of his little post box – not three times, like Kayla claimed – and starts in my direction. Hipster, I think, cool and unattainable and awesome, as he strides towards me in slow motion. Those eyes, like something blurred beneath a mist-covered pane of glass. Those cheekbones – God, did he have cheekbones like that before? I could reach out and cut my finger on them, if I ever dared to do anything like touch him.

Which, of course, I won’t. I can’t even bring myself to meet his gaze when it flicks to me for just the barest second – like maybe he can’t help himself. He wants to be aloof, I think. He needs to pretend that all of this is just something I dreamed up, one night when I couldn’t sleep.

Only that one darting look says otherwise. It flashes out of him, as bright and sharp as he is dark and blunted. And once he’s made it all the way to the end of this stifling green hallway – like a tunnel in a funhouse that doesn’t exist – I take that one surreptitious glance and bury it down deep inside me.

I keep it close, for all the times I’ve wanted something like that and been denied.

He saw me.

And I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I have seen him.

* * *

The next time I dare to look, I’m disappointed. Of course I am. He’s closed his curtains, like a sign: I know what you did. And I don’t like it.

Even though I know that’s completely irrational. If I accept that he knows what I did, I have to also accept that he did it on purpose. He could have stopped once he realised I was watching – and yet here we are. Trapped in our places. Him with his curtains drawn, me wishing they weren’t.

Though I understand it’s not just because of the dirty things now. It’s not just because of his gorgeous body and his filthy actions, I swear it’s not. It’s those eyes, burning out at me. It’s that look that lingered long after the event, so furtive and … and complicit, somehow. I lie in bed thinking of the weight of that gaze, and when I actually entertain the idea of putting my hand between my legs it’s with his face in mind.

Would he stare at me like that as he fucked me? With that kind of intensity? I don’t know and obviously will never be privy to it, but that’s beside the point, isn’t it? I can fantasise. For the first time in my life, I can actually fantasise about a real, living, breathing person and not panic.

I’m safe, behind the glass. I can lie on my stomach and press a pillow between my thighs, then imagine him taking me like that, haunches up like an animal. With Sid, it was never like that. It was always face to face so that he could slap me as we did it, but I’m not sure my blue-eyed Serial Killer would be that way.

He’d probably just chop up my body and put it in the freezer.

Or maybe he’ll simply leave his curtains open, when I least expect it.

It’s the seventh day since it happened, and I’ve almost started thinking it was a dream. And then I wake up twisted on my side, foggy with images I don’t want to have in my head, and there’s a glow seeping into my apartment. I can see it just edging its fingers across the carpet, like the light of a convenience store after you’ve just trekked ten miles through a barren desert.

I think of the Rocky Horror Picture Show – that song they sing when they see the castle and think everything’s going to be OK – and then I heave myself out of bed like a zombie and stumble across to that light.

It can’t be helped. I’m dying of thirst. I’m drowning in desperation. I have to hang on to my own curtains just to keep myself standing, and then I see him. He’s in the window, just like before. On the same day, too, I realise, which practically makes this some sort of ritual. I was silly to doubt him, or imagine he thought badly of me.

He just likes to do it on the same day every week, the way he likes to do everything. The orange, I remember, always gets peeled at the same time. And he picks his mail up at certain intervals – maybe when it’s safe to come out of his lair.

And so it follows that he stands in front of his window half-naked, at the previously allotted time. He’s even wearing the same garb he did before – those queer longjohns, so tight over his every bulge and curve.

Though there’s a subtle difference.

He’s not stood up. He’s sat at that little table in front of his window, and he isn’t staring straight forward, like an automaton playing out a role.

He’s staring up at my window. I know he is. I know he is even though I kind of lean forwards and look up, expecting to somehow see a prettier woman in the apartment above … Or maybe she’s below me? Yeah, maybe she’s doing an exotic dance for him in the apartment below me, and, once she’s done, that’s when he masturbates.

For her. Not for me.

And the message he’s scrawled on his window in lipstick?

That’s for her, too.

Your turn now, it says, and I can’t help admiring his gall. I admire his lettering, too – as neat as he seems, as ordered, in spite of the ink he’s used. I’m fairly certain it’s lipstick – so red and garish, glaring in the backwash of that strange light from his apartment – but of course I can’t fathom why.

He seems more the sort to have made a neatly printed sign in Microsoft Word, with an elegant and stark border and a font that can be registered clearly. It’s your turn now, it would say, but maybe with a sincerely, The Serial Killer after it, instead of what I get.

Which is nothing.

I’m allowed that much – no names, no promises, no pleases or thank yous – and even that much seems like a stretch. I didn’t realise he knew how to talk. That wasn’t a part of the programme when he first introduced me to it.

I’m just supposed to watch, I think. That’s my role: to watch him peel out of his clothes and abuse himself. He has to know that I can’t do the same for him in return, no matter how tightly he folds those massive arms or how closely he watches me be this shadow in the window.

Because that’s what I’ll look like, isn’t it? My light isn’t on. He can maybe make out the wispy white corner of my nightgown, and possibly the edge of one of my arms. I’m a ghost made up of higgledy-piggledy random parts, which he’s probably pieced together in completely the wrong order.

In his head, he’s given me a slimmer build, smaller breasts, daintier feet and hands. That glimpse he caught of me in the hall … it hasn’t helped him. He probably just saw my eyes, black as night and twice as lovely as the rest of me, and made his suppositions from there.

Now I’m some exotic gypsy, ready to play for him. I’m not a girl who let some man degrade her for a year, before breaking free into absolute nothingness. Into this place, chill as an arctic night. Into this life, monotonous and samey but ultimately safe.

I don’t have to worry in this life.

Or, at least, I didn’t have to worry. Until now.

Which is probably why I slowly draw my curtain back across the window, and return to my bed. And then, once I’m there, I sleep the numbing sleep of the dead.

* * *

The words are gone by the next night, and I know what that means all too well. I missed my chance. I didn’t do what I was told, so now I have to pay. Of course, the price in this situation is far less than the ones I’ve paid in the past. It’s just a withdrawal of a promise, an erasure of possible delights and pleasures that I’m sure I didn’t want anyway.

Yet it stings all the same. I’m back to being just a checkout girl, who doesn’t dance with a Serial Killer in the pale moonlight. I’m nothing, I think, as I stare down at his sullenly dark window.

And then the light in his apartment abruptly goes on, and suddenly my heart is beating like a trapped bird in my chest. There doesn’t even seem to be any build up to it, either. One second I’m silent and still inside, the next second my pulse is trying to leap out of my body. I can lie and lie and lie to myself, it seems, and pretend that I don’t care whether I’m nothing or not, but my body tells the truth.

It means something to me that he comes to the window half-dressed, sweatpants slung so low on his hips a breath could knock them down. It means that he didn’t care whether I did anything for him or not.

He’s still going to do anything for me.

And he does. Anything, I mean. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a guy do the things he offers me, right there in his window where anyone could see. In all honesty, I’ve never even seen a guy masturbate, or be vulnerable, or give a single thing without taking. So this … this is right out.

He puts his fingers in his mouth, slow, slow. Like he’s putting on a show for me, and knows it. He even knows the things I want to see – like the glimpse of his tongue I get between those two filthy fingers. It’s a promise, I think, some sort of seductive version of a guy suggesting a very specific sex act, but different to that, too.

I don’t think of guys in bars, waggling their tongues. I think of that slippery thing just easing over my swollen clit, and then suddenly my hand is on the window, holding me up. The glass is ice cold beneath my palm and barely any comfort at all, but that’s OK. I don’t need comfort here.

I need him to keep doing whatever he’s going to do.

Though of course it isn’t what I expect. At first it goes that way. He slides that hand down under the waistband of his sweatpants, and I can see him stroking over the thick shape beneath the material. I can even recall exactly what that heavy thing looked like, all slippery at the tip and swollen, most of it the same honey colour as his gorgeous body.

But he only lingers there a little while. He strokes once, maybe twice, enough to get his eyes to stutter closed. I see that lewd little tongue come out to wet his lips – those lips like a bow, notching an arrow straight at my heart – and then his hand slides around inside that secretive material. I mean, you can just about see what he’s doing. The cloth is thin enough to make out his knuckles, shifting like a formless face beneath a veil.

But it’s all just hidden enough that you can imagine you’re seeing things. It’s a magic trick, an illusion, and I’m holding my breath for some kind of big reveal. I’ve clenched my fist into the centre of my chest again, as that hand makes its way around his body and oh God, oh God.

He’s not going to do that, is he? Does he know I’m not even sure what that is? I’ve heard whispers. I’ve seen movies. I know that people don’t just put peg A into slot B. Yet even so I’m trembling and mesmerised, watching him touch himself in this unbearably intimate way.

It’s worse than if he were naked. I have to imagine it all instead – though all my imagination can come up with is him stroking slow and wet between the cheeks of his arse, teasing himself the way that I sometimes tease myself. I don’t go in, you know. I don’t do that. I just rub over that tightly clenched hole while I play with my clit, and usually when I do my mind goes elsewhere.

But he keeps my mind right here.

His mouth is open now, and his eyes are closed. I can still tell what expression he’s wearing behind them, however. I’d know mindless pleasure anywhere, having seen it faked a million times – which makes me think this is just a show, for a little while. He’s squirming around in a way men never do, and I can almost hear his moans as he pretends to work a finger into his tight little asshole … but none of it’s actually real.

Until he jerks and sinks his teeth into his lower lip, and I see the spreading darkness on the front of his sweatpants.

I may be dumb and mute and foolish, but I know what that means. He’s just worked himself to a shuddering climax on those probing, searching fingers, and I missed half of it, imagining it was all a masquerade. I missed the strangest, most exciting event of my life, because I couldn’t believe it was real.

It’s not a surprise.

* * *

I’ve always thought the fluorescent lights in the store where I work were very bright. Unbearably bright. I go home still squinting from their glare, and remain so even in the closed-off darkness of The Courtyard.

And yet somehow they seem dimmer today than they did before. They’ve lost power in the time between me looking into the Serial Killer’s eyes and right now. They’ve turned to a low and crackling blue, somewhere in the distance of my life.

Though it isn’t just them. The candy-bright wrappers that line the shelves seem to have faded; my apron is more worn and withered than it once was. I take the thing off the moment I get home, and marvel at the thinness of the material, the patheticness of the pattern. Is this what I’ve been wearing all this time? This chequered thing, as limp and lifeless as a body found floating in the pool?

I don’t know, but it feels good to get the apron off. And it feels even better to stand beneath the groaning pipes of my crookedly tiled shower and wash all of that away. When I’m done, I put on the long nightgown – the one I cleaned and dried this morning, in the rumbling machines that shudder around the washroom – and go to the window.

By the time I do, my heart is already hammering in my chest. These little meetings – they could still be a dream of some sort. Maybe I think I’m awake when I’m asleep, and asleep when I’m awake. Maybe he’s changed his mind, and finds me a dull sort of creature, now.

It’s not as though he’s wrong after all. I’m so dull I’m almost crying, torn with tension over something as simple as opening the curtain. What if he’s there, oh God, what if he’s there? And even worse: what if he’s not? I don’t think I could take it if he wasn’t, though, when I wrench the curtain back and his window is dark and silent, I’m surprisingly calm.

This is how things are supposed to be, I think. I can’t be disappointed about something that shouldn’t really happen to me. It’s not even all that big a deal, really – just a little game played through two windows in the middle of the night. No one would ascribe it some profound meaning, or pin so many of their hopes on it continuing.

Yet my heart still jerks in my chest when I catch a glimpse of something stirring through the darkness. A flash of white, I think it is – the way my nightgown probably looks – and then I see the now familiar shape of him more clearly.

He’s sat in a chair in front of the table that sits below his window. And everyone now and then he’ll reach forward for a glass he’s placed on the wood, in this deliberate sort of way – like a rich man in a velvet club, waiting for the girl to come out.

I’m the girl, I think. He’s waiting and watching for me, even though I can’t see his eyes to confirm. There’s a black band of darkness over them like a blindfold made of nothing, and, I have to say, it makes me feel easier about turning on the light. His eyes are as sightless as the dozens of curtain-covered windows that stare down at me, so what does it matter if I just do this thing?

I barely feel exposed at all once I have. I’m electric instead, trembling with a kind of excitement I’ve never felt before. Different points of my body call to me, call to me, like a siren song. And I go to them. I do.

I stroke my breasts through material that had seemed thick before but now feels gossamer light. In fact, it’s so light I can make out the exact shape of my stiff nipples beneath, so taut and spiky I can hardly bear to touch them. And the response I get when I do … oh God. The sensation that radiates outwards as I circle first one, then the other …

It’s enough to make me gasp without thinking, and then of course my face heats directly afterwards. Of course it does – I’m not supposed to make a sound. I’m not supposed to be noisy and uncouth, and I think of that restriction all the way up until the moment of realisation:

It doesn’t actually matter if I am.

After all, I’m alone right now. There’s no one else in here with me. I could scream and no one would hear me, though I’m nowhere close to that. I’m closer to moaning, like some shameless whore, and the more I do, the worse it gets.

I’m already wet, I know. I can feel my own slick cream every time I move, easing over my swollen clit and making all of those flushed folds so slippery, so ready to be parted and stroked, though I’m not ready for that just yet. I have to wait, until the pleasure reaches fever pitch. Until I’m gasping and tilting forwards towards the glass, pulling and plucking at my nipples while my face heats and my mouth makes this lewd sort of O.

Though even that isn’t enough to push me over the edge. I’m close to doing it – hell, I’ve already traversed several of my own personal boundaries, like the noise-making and the voyeurism and the need to just take something, even if it makes me feel ashamed. But I’m not quite there, until he reaches a hand up, suddenly, in the light from the middle of The Courtyard and clear enough for me to see.

And then he does something I recognise immediately:

He strokes over the shape of my body, through the glass.

Of course I try to pretend otherwise at first. All the old issues take over, and I’m left imagining that he means something else. It can’t be my body he’s outlining, like that, so reverently, so slowly and softly. No one would want to touch me like that, and even if they did … that isn’t my shape. That subtle curve at my hip, the fullness of my breasts … how can he even tell that I look like that beneath this shapeless gown?

And then I realise I’m practically clutching the thing to me, following the path he’s making with that twisting, curving hand, and I know for sure. He’s touching me, across a million miles of space and through two panes of glass. He’s uncovering my body, those fingers finding their way over my jaw and my throat, clutching briefly in a way that thrills me, before sliding on down to other places I can’t bear to touch.

Only I can, when he’s touching them for me. He rubs his knuckles over my swollen mound and I find myself doing the same. I even turn my hand to get the exact same effect, pressing in when he does, forcing those knots of bone deep into my slick slit.

Everything parts easily for me, even through material. And my clit is so stiff and swollen that I barely have to push against myself to get some pressure on it. Just a little movement, a little rub back and forth, and I’m masturbating for a stranger.

A stranger who then makes a very specific sort of gesture, which I can’t easily ignore or dismiss. Lift your nightgown, that gesture says. No more than a wave of his other hand, really, but enough to make me try. Quickly I do it, quickly, like some furtive flasher in a supermarket, aware of how easily I could be caught.

Someone could just slide open their curtain in the middle of the night, for example. Or maybe the girl from 9G will walk by, just as I had imagined. Just in time to see me expose my slippery pussy to this stranger’s hungry gaze.

And it will look slippery, I know. I can feel the wetness on my perfectly waxed and oh-so-sensitive skin, and if I dared to glance down I know I’d see it glistening there. In fact, I don’t even need to see it glistening there. It’s obvious that I look as lewd and aroused as a woman could possibly be, because, after a moment of watching me, his hand goes to that place between his legs.

I can tell it does, even through all of this frustrating darkness. I can make out the motion of his thick bicep, as he works himself to the sight of me. And after a second of that desperate motion, he brings the fingers of his free hand to his lips and licks, then reaches forwards to stroke over my messy slit, through the glass.

He wants me to get off at the same time he does, I’m certain. He’s going to jerk and come inside that clingy material, and when he does he wants me to do it, too. He wants me to slide two fingers through my swollen folds, find my clit, and stroke myself in time to the slow, easy rub he’s giving himself.

And when he puts it like that, I find him impossible to resist. My face is flaming and my body is strung as taut as a wire, but I work my way through all of my mortifying slickness, until I’ve found that agonising point. That stiff little bud, so ready to be touched.

And then I just rub over it with the pad of my fingertip, just once, but once is enough. I can’t even hold off long enough to see if I was right and that he’s ready to come too. I just stumble over the edge into a thick, uncontrollable orgasm, more slipperiness spilling over my hand as I do, body spasming and twisting beneath the pressure of it.

I’ve never longed to know his name as hard as I do now, while calling out words that are not him. I moan uuuh and God and yes, but none of them fits my sultry stranger, my Serial Killer. They just have to make do as the most intense orgasm of my life barrels through my body, the sight of him stroking himself driving it on.

By the time he arches in his chair and shows me what he’s been doing – hand sliding back and forth over his slick and very bare prick – I’m sure this thing has gone on forever. I’m still coming when he finally spurts, thick and copious and all over that neat little table of his.

Though that’s not the best thing about it. No, the best thing about it comes after he’s almost done. He sags back in his chair, and a split second before he does I see the side of his face – caught in pleasure and desire, as beautiful as it had seemed in the hallway.

And then I see his tongue, curling up to catch his upper lip – so greedily, I think, so different to the restrained person he usually appears to be – and that’s all I need. That’s what I take away from this lewd act, to store away for leaner, crueller times. Tomorrow I’ll believe it was all just imagined desire and lust and loveliness.

And then I’ll remember that tongue just kissing his upper lip, and make it real again.

I’m aware that this is a ridiculous thing to do – like a stalker, rooting through things that belong to a person they’re having a fake relationship with. But, after last night, I can’t help it. I think of the name I couldn’t call out and then I just wait, and watch which mailbox he goes to.

I do it surreptitiously, out of the corner of one eye.

And then once he’s made his way past me – me with my back to him, him staring straight ahead, the air between us bristling like that moment just before lightning strikes – I go to the place he was. I run my fingers over the Sellotaped name on the front of that dingy grey metal.

Ivan. Ivan Orlinsky, it says, which of course only makes things worse. Now I’m thinking of far-off places in the past, where men with beards stride around through the snow and everyone has mysterious accents. He’s the Russian of my imagination, the Polish of my dreams, or maybe some other nationality that I can’t even think of.

Ivan Orlinsky, I think, from the land of TirAsleen. And then I have to stop, because the end of that tale is: who came across oceans of time to be with a tired, pathetic checkout girl called Abbie Gough.

It doesn’t quite go, does it? Abbie and Ivan. Abbie is the girl you shove into the road on your way to a business meeting. She’s not the mysterious sex partner of a dense-eyed man called Ivan.

And yet that’s the name on the parcel he’s left in my mailbox, in that same neat cursive script he used for the window. Abbie, it says, just above the impeccable seam he’s made with the expensive wrapping – a perfectly straight and perpendicular join, held down by tape so crisply cut it could have been done with a machine.

Hell, maybe it was. It’s called him. He’s made of metal cogs and synchronised gears, and, when he’s required to send an unexpected gift to a stunned girl, they perform the task with technical precision.

I can hardly bear to tear into the thing, it’s that perfect. The paper’s so thick, so glossy, it’s actually nicer than most of the gifts I’ve ever received. It would be a shame to ruin it with rabid fumbling by my mailbox, as Mrs Hindleman from apartment 7F looks on.

So I take the gift upstairs. I sit on my bed and place it in my lap, for further inspection, though no amount of analysis will reveal his error. He hasn’t made one. I have to somehow inch into this thing, with great and deliberate care.

Of course that only makes the anticipation greater. I can feel my eagerness clutching at my throat by the time I’ve tenderly undone the wrapping, and when I see the carved wooden box beneath my breath chokes off entirely.

He’s made this box, I think. He’s whittled it out of some dense, dark wood, for reasons I can’t fathom. I just know they’re there, these reasons, I know he’s done this. I can tell by the way the box feels and looks, and, most of all, by how hard it is to get into.

He’s made a puzzle box, seemingly equal on all sides, with no clear hinges or seams. It’s just one endless whorl and curve carved into wood, as beautiful as anything I’ve seen. As disturbing, too. It’s almost too intricate, I think, like a painting by that guy with the staircases – full of hidden thorns and secret upside-down passageways. If I touch the wrong thing, I’ll be drawn into the labyrinth that lives at the centre of the underworld, and never escape.

Which is a silly thing to think by the light of Wheel of Fortune, blaring silently from my TV. But it lingers all the same, as I turn the box over and over, searching. There’s got to be a way in, after all. He hasn’t just carved me a block of wood, I’m sure – though in some ways it’s still a surprise, when I find the key.

A little shock goes through me the moment I push against the body of a bird, wrapped all around in vines and leaves, and something that wasn’t there before springs open. A little drawer, I think it is, but of course I don’t dare look for the longest time. I glance up at Wheel of Fortune instead, and watch the colours whirl around.

And then when it seems like I care the least, when I’m barely paying attention, I slide the drawer out. I look inside the box he made for me, and find what’s going to happen next in this brand-new life I’ve found myself in.

I’m going to wear a piece of jewellery, it seems. One he’s made for me, as lovely as the box in its own way, but with a far different intent. The box is a beautiful puzzle, waiting for me to dare to open it. The gift inside is easy to read, immediately. I’ve seen similar things in dirty movies, though none quite as pretty as this. This is a work of art, really, as is the note he’s printed on a piece of perfect cream card inside.

Wear it for me, the note says, though it’s not the words I’m interested in. The words are a command, of the type men have given me all my life. But the question mark on the end … the question mark is the thing I’m drawn to. I trace it with my fingers, that curve as compelling as the wood he’s worked into such lovely shapes.

You can if you want to, that question mark says. But not if you don’t. And of course I already know what happens when I don’t – he doesn’t take all my privileges away from me. He won’t hold my head under water until I pass out. It’s not an ultimatum.

It’s just a choice.

Yes, or no?

* * *

His gift takes some getting used to. It’s easy enough to wear and fits me perfectly, as though that hand he ran over me through the glass was actually measuring the size of my hips. He made the gossamer strands with them in mind, and everything else followed: the trickling, teasing length of silver that slides between the cheeks of my arse and holds the base of the contraption tight to me. The V at the front that’s almost like a pair of panties, until you get to the smooth rounded shape that now nestles between the lips of my pussy.

It’s barely conspicuous when I look at myself in the mirror; I can’t imagine what purpose it serves for my dark voyeur. But, oh boy, can I feel it. I can feel it when I walk and when I’m lying down. I can feel it as I sit behind my till at the Minimart, serving oblivious customers – that smooth plastic shape sliding over my clit at the oddest and most inconvenient times.

But most of all I can feel it after I’ve seen him in the hallway, as composed and indifferent as he always seems in person. He could be carved in marble, as I walk past his implacable back. We could be total strangers who’ve never shared so much as a glance.

And then just as I’m at the height of this disappointment, just as I’ve convinced myself, again, that he doesn’t care for me at all, a bolt of electric pleasure shoots from that little sliver of plastic, all the way through my oversensitised clit and straight on down to the marrow of my bones.

I think I go down to one knee. I definitely stumble, at any rate. I know this because while I’m floundering in sudden stunned pleasure, he comes right up to me. He comes right up to me and then he puts a hand on my elbow.

And, as he does it, he says: ‘Are you all right, Miss Gough? Here, let me help you up.’

As though I simply slipped.

Oh, let me process that for a while. Let me drown in it. That little slip of plastic between my legs … it’s not just a covering that quaintly teases. It’s a toy. He’s built some kind of little buzzer into the thing, and when I least expected it – when he seemed at his most casual and uncaring – he purposefully activated it.

And now he’s helping me up in front of Mrs Belvedere from 8G, as though I had a funny and entirely spontaneous turn. It had nothing to do with him. He’s an innocent passer-by, a good Samaritan.

Oh, and also, he’s a genius.

I can hardly take him being this close to me, though naturally he knew I would feel this way. It was obvious that I’d be overwhelmed by his toy and then again by the clean, clear scent of him, like a forest in winter. And he knew that I’d bristle at the feel of his hand on my arm, pressing in a way that’s somehow more intimate than that slippery plastic rubbing against my clit.

Though that’s not really a surprise. Every part of my body is suddenly raw and exposed, a nerve ending he’s stripped of all covering. He could touch me anywhere and I’d shudder to feel it, and I think he knows this.

Which is why he portions out his contact in increments, each one more exciting and certain than the last. A hand on my arm, a hand on my back – ever so light, as though he’s not doing this at all. And when he finally steps away, his faint touch leaves me just as he knew it would: aching for more, but thrilling with the thought of what’s to come.

Someday he’ll actually kiss me, and I’ll turn to dust and blow away.

‘It’s all right, Mrs Belvedere,’ he says, but he doesn’t look at her as he talks. He looks at me, eyes blazing with that odd sultry heat, and then he tells me: ‘Abbie’s fine.’

And it’s true. I am.

Until he presses that damned buzzer again.

This time the sensation goes through me hard enough to force my teeth to clack together, though I’m glad they do. It stops the sound I want to make from coming out of me in a big glut, and saves me from further embarrassment courtesy of Mrs Belvedere.

She’s staring at me oddly as it is, and, when Ivan says to her that I might need a lie down, her expression doesn’t change. She’s just waiting for the Serial Killer to do something odd and perverted, with devices and implements and other lurid things.

She doesn’t know he already has. He’s doing it right now as he guides me in the direction of the stairwell, that thing almost constantly humming against my clit. I’ve got absolutely no clue how he thinks I’m going to climb these steps with this hot pleasure washing through me, constantly, but he keeps going. He keeps urging me up the stairs. Pretty soon I’m going to orgasm, and then what?

I could barely stay on my feet the other night in front of the window. I can’t keep putting one foot in front of the other like this, like nothing’s happened. I have to cling onto the banister; I have to nearly crawl. And all the while he’s walking behind me, pressing and pressing whatever sort of device he’s using to drive me insane.

Which sounds weird enough on its own, until I realise how slow he must be walking to stay behind me. Like my dark and perverted shadow, just hovering at my edges.

Waiting for me to crack, I think. Waiting for me to turn desperately and beg him to stop.

Or maybe beg him for more. Because, dear God, I want to. I feel like I’ve been clinging to the outskirts of this pleasure forever, and, though I can climb the steps and keep myself steady and not give too many outward signs, inside I’m one long pulsing ache. My clit is close to throbbing, and I know without checking that my panties are soaked through.

I’ve wet myself because of a piece of jewellery, I think, and the shame that follows is …

Blissful.

I walk slanted down my hallway, one hand occasionally searching for the wall, and I don’t care, I don’t care. I’m lost in the heat that’s engulfed my slippery pussy, and my usually so colourless face. I’m swaying down the tilted hallway in the labyrinthine box he made for me, drunk on desire and thick with sensation.